50/50: Half Funny, Half Touching

Seth Rogen movie manages to be both funny and poignant
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 30, 2011 12:30 PM CDT

With a current 92% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, 50/50 gets praise for its blend of comedy and drama about a young man diagnosed with cancer.

  • In Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams calls the movie “poignant, funny and profane”: It “understands the woozy terror of a life or death crisis,” she notes—though “unsurprisingly,” Seth Rogen et al., “like true students of the Judd Apatow school of filmmaking, never quite get a grip on their female characters.”

  • The movie “needs to be serious enough to be real as well as light enough to be funny,” observes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. “Though it falls off the wagon at times, it maintains its balance remarkably well.”
  • Colin Covert, writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, calls the film “50% affecting medical drama and 50% first-rate character study.”
  • And in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Carrie Rickey says lead actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt is “the definition of nuance, is touching, funny, and fierce—an unusual combination of moods, but deeply affecting.”
(More movie review stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X